More bad news for the Catholic Church during this holy week. The Miami Herald has published a detailed account of how the church heirarchy may have not acted fast enough to defrock a priest accused of molesting refugee boys in the 1980’s.
The Archdiocese of Miami, along with top Vatican authorities, knew as far back as 1968 that the Rev. Ernesto Garcia-Rubio, a priest later defrocked amid child sex-abuse allegations, had a troubled past in Cuba before transferring to South Florida, lawyers representing victims claimed Monday.
[….]
Garcia-Rubio, now 73, was celebrated as the Archdiocese of Miami’s “patron saint” of young Central American and Cuban refugee boys who flocked to his Our Lady of Divine Providence in Sweetwater in the 1980s. He served there from 1975-88.
[….]
The complaints against Garcia-Rubio — first lodged at the Sweetwater church — eventually surfaced in The Herald story, which highlighted four sex-abuse allegations by teenage Nicaraguan and Salvadoran refugees from 1983 to 1988.
Read the whole sordid tale, here.
For me, this news comes in the wake of other disappointing news we have reported at RRW in the last few weeks. First, we saw the US Conference of Catholic Bishops help organize that Marxist March on Washington earlier this month, here. We’ve had two reports this week alone where Catholic refugee resettlement agencies have not fulfilled their obligations to properly care for refugees in Fredericksburg, VA, here, and San Antonio, TX here. And, adding insult to injury, the USCCB could not function at all if they weren’t funded by us—the taxpayer!